Rob Stewart performing with Serbian punk band Atheist Rap in the documentary Slaughter Nick for President.

To me, the early ’90s TV show Sweating Bullets – a sort of Baywatch-meets-Magnum PI knockoff about a detective in a beachfront town – was merely an adjunct to a David Letterman joke, one of the “Crimetime After Primetime” series on CBS that Letterman routinely mocked before he was on CBS. To Rob Stewart, the Canadian actor who played Nick Slaughter, the show’s wisecracking, chest-baring hero, it was the dubious highlight of a career that by the late 2000s had sunk so low he was living in his parents’ basement in the Toronto suburb of Brampton.

And in Serbia, where the show aired as Tropical Heat, it was a cult phenomenon, a sun-soaked respite from the deprivation and repression of the Slobodan Milosevic era and nationalist wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, the last of which led to the devastating NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999. In the late ’90s, when tens of thousands of Serbs took to the streets to challenge and ultimately end Milosevic’s rule, Nick Slaughter was an ironic figurehead of the student-led protests, touted in graffiti as a presidential candidate and hailed in the song “Slaughteru Nietzsche” by popular punk band Atheist Rap. (Chorus: “Nick Slaughter, Serbia salutes you!”)

Rob Stewart knew none of this until late 2008, when he stumbled on a Nick Slaughter Facebook fan page populated mostly by Serbs and discovered that a character he’d come to loathe was not just famous in the Balkan country but a symbol of freedom. The following summer, when Atheist Rap invited Stewart to perform “Slaughteru Nietzsche” with them at a punk festival, childhood friends Marc and Liza Vespi, siblings who also had film and TV experience, joined him to document the show and dig into the bizarre history of his Serbian stardom.

The resulting film, Slaughter Nick for President, toggles between jokey bemusement and earnest substance as Stewart is feted like a hero, appears on game shows and a weird commercial, and talks to Serb dissidents and cultural critics who explain, wittily, cogently, and sincerely, how a cheeseball TV private eye can make a genuine mark in a troubled place. Ahead of the movie’s Canadian theatrical premiere May 10 in Toronto, we conversed via Skype video with the charming and, it must be said, still pretty handsome Rob Stewart about his Serbian adventure.

MFW: At the start of the film your life, at least professionally, is kind of sad. Have things picked up for you? Judging by IMDB you seem to be working a lot.

Rob Stewart: It picked up a lot. It couldn’t have anything to do with Serbia because nobody knew about it here when things started to pick up. It’s really sort of anomalous. When I got back, within about two months I started working, and then it just got better and better. I think something changed in me. That’s the only way I can look at it.

Like you came back more confident, having gone through this experience?

I think so. I’m Canadian, so it’s that self-deprecating thing. I grew up in Brampton, where it’s not OK to be too highfalutin’. You’re father’ll backhand you. It’s this crazy thing you do to yourself. When I got Sweating Bullets I was oddly conflicted, because I wasn’t an actor. It just came out of nowhere. All my friends were going bankrupt – I don’t know if you remember 1990, but it was a shitty year for everybody – and I was like, “Yeah, I got a job in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, I’m the star of a TV show.” I just felt like a dick [laughs]. And then the show, I was always embarrassed about it, because I figured that was the one thing I was gonna be remembered for and it was kind of cheesy. Very cheesy. I always had this protective mechanism where, when I acted, it was, “Well, I don’t know what I’m doing,” just to cover any embarrassment. I came back from [Serbia] and it’s not like I got an ego or anything, it’s basically just, it’s OK to do what I do. It’s OK to do that because sometimes it has a good effect. It was like a redemption of some sort.

Being greeted as a national hero when you arrive in a foreign country would do that. The whole [Serbian] press was there to greet you at the airport. You knew you were a celebrity there; did the organizers give you any warning that it was going to be at that level?

No. About a week and a half before we got there, they said, “Look, don’t be disappointed if nothing happens, because the Serbians, they might be like, ‘Oh, hey, you were on that show,’ and then there’s nothing. Even if something happens, it’ll only last three days and then the press will turn on you.” I was like, OK, that’s fine, it’s a documentary – if it happens we’ll just run with it and try to make that amusing and self-effacing. Our plan A was to make fun of me anyway, make fun of the show. We scrapped that as soon as we got to the airport. Marc pulled me aside and said, “Plan B: don’t make fun of the show.”

You still do make fun of the show, but you also come to a kind of reckoning with it.

Exactly. That’s the sort of fine line we walked. There were people on the street coming up, enormous guys, 30-year-old guys, and they’d tear up when they saw me. And once you get to doing the interviews [about] the war and everything, you realize, OK, whatever the show was doesn’t matter anymore, it’s gone past that. It’s like making fun of a nursery rhyme, of Brahms’ Lullaby or something, when it meant something to a child.

You’re making this movie for about three years and a few months before you come out, Searching for Sugar Man comes out. Did you think to yourself, “Shit, somebody else has the same story, and they got there first”?

It crosses your mind. But as Liza pointed out, it’s not the same movie, because Sugar Man actually has talent [laughs].

What was the time line, and the thought progression, between stumbling on your Serbian fame and deciding to make a movie about it?

It was almost immediate. The Facebook [Tropical Heat page] administrator, a guy named Ivan who we ended up going to see when we were over there, he sent me a letter, outlining the absurd political angle to it. I sent the letter to Liza. Marc was living right beside me, so I could talk to him any time – I just leaned over the fence to Marc and said, “I’m famous in Serbia.” Liza got back right away and said, “Let’s make a documentary.” The fact that I was living at my parents’ place, and we all had gone through divorces, we were all separated from our [spouses] – it was right at the same time. Marc was living back at his parents’ place. So it was just in this anomalous moment when we were all in broken mode.

Are you still in your parents’ house?

Oh, no, this is mine. I’m down the street. I can hit a 9-iron and get my parents’ place.

There’s a moment in the movie where you see some of the bombing damage that’s still very visible in Belgrade, and you say, “We did this.” Did you feel any kind of Western guilt?

Yeah, and I wanted to call it, right away. I’m a Canadian, and Canadians dropped 10 percent of those bombs on civilians in Belgrade. If I had my druthers I’d be still on the soapbox, because I don’t think anybody knows that. Ten percent of those bombs. And if you go there – they dropped them on civilians. They call it the fog of war – oh, well, you know, highly advanced, computer-run planes just can’t see through the fog. Three thousand people died, as many people as died in the Twin Towers. It’s hard to shake that off, and I’m not gonna not say it. I was in the country for five minutes and I already wanted to admit our complicity in that.

The film has screened in Croatia, where Serbia is not necessarily the most popular neighbor.

That wasn’t our target demographic [laughs].

I know it won an award at the [Zagreb Film Festival], but in terms of the larger audience, what was the reaction there?

The producers were there, our Serbian partners, and they said it was amazing, everybody loved it. We did get to read the judges’ comments on why they gave us the award, and that was really, really, really a huge victory for us. That was an interesting thing, that the Croatians could look at that and say, OK, we understand now what was going on, with the people. This is the difference – it’s the political situation. I don’t know what the date is today [editor's note: it was May 6], but I’d be pretty sure that within two weeks Americans will have boots on the ground in Syria. That’s my prediction. You can see the buildup. We’ve all seen it before, right? Now, if you’re an American, like my son is American – he was born there – if you asked him, “Hey, do you think we should be sending troops into Syria?” it wouldn’t matter what he said. There’s going to be boots on the ground in Syria whether you like it or not. Whether people liked it or not, there were boots in the ground in Iraq. It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you’re on, whether you agree with it or not, they’re going to war. And so you get that separation between the political machine, or the military/political machine, and the people themselves.

I think the movie, when the Croatians saw it, [they] could see that separation so clearly and say, OK, this is what’s going on. There’s always people that become nationalistic, always people that are willing to be the worst. You know that W.B. Yeats poem? “The worst are filled with passionate intensity” – “The Second Coming.” It’s an astute line, because in these situations it brings out the best and worst in people. But generally they saw that this was not the will of the Serbian people. That’s our victory, in terms of the movie. That message came across.

I’ve read that as a university student in Ontario you wrote songs and performed locally. Did you have aspirations for a career in music?

Well, I couldn’t sing, which was a real stumbling block if you want to become a singer [laughs]. I used to act songs, sort of talk my way through them. I loved writing, but I don’t think I was particularly gifted in that area. My thing was words. I was an English major. Poetry led me to start playing guitar and putting them to words. I didn’t have the chops to be a musician.

My sole source of pride on that trip – that first press conference, they cut to a national audience, every TV station in Serbia went live. You’d think I’d be nervous about that. When I think about it now, that should be nerve-wracking. It’s not like I’ve been doing press conferences for the last 20 years. My heart rate didn’t rise a bit. ‘Cause the whole time I was there, I was nervous about playing the song. It’s such a tight little song. It sounds easy but it’s deceptively intricate, and I hadn’t played in a while. I told [Atheist Rap] to unplug my amp. I’m having panic attacks about this live performance. They’re such a good band, and I had such respect for them. “Just, you know, take the thing, put the volume down. You guys sound great without me.” But my amp was on loud. I did one of these [mimes hitting a chord] just before we started playing – “That’s mine!” [Laughs]

It also probably helped that you had what looked like about a dozen beers before you got on stage.

Easily. And not an ounce of drunkenness. Because of the nerves and the hype.

Was there any level at which you could appreciate this musical part of it as a fantasy or a dream come true? Or was it just total nerves?

This is the thing that happened: once I got over the shock of the amp being on and ridiculously loud, I just saw the people. There’s 3,000 people there, just mental for this band. As soon as we started the song, it just came out and I didn’t have to think about it, which was great. It was really like, this is a fantasy, this is what I wanted to do when I was a teenager – be on stage with my guitar. That was a tremendous moment. And the party after was off the hook.

Slaughter Nick for President screens May 10-16 at Toronto’s Carlton Cinema, with Rob Stewart in attendance the first two nights.

Hi,
Just saw the film and fantastic! It’s funny, it’s interesting, it’s inspiring. This actor’s voyage from semi-out-of work-living- in -parent’s basement -actor to realizing he is a star and more importantly a cultural hero of a revolution is really a fun and awesome story. Great film, lots of fun!